In what you can certainly call a surprise move, The Pirate Bay has been sold. Global Gaming Factory has announced that is has purchased the torrent search engine for 60 million Swedish Krona (7.8 million USD). They plan to build a business model around The Pirate Bay where content providers and copyright owners get compensatation.

As we all know, The Pirate Bay is a torrent search engine where users can find torrents of all sorts of content. Even thought the website itself doesn't host any copyrighted content, they did lose a landmark copyright infringement trial in Sweden earlier this year, with the judge imposing a massive fine and 1 year in jailtime.

You're probably not the only one who has never heard of Global Gaming Factory before. According to the press release they have "the largest network of Internet cafes and game centers and provides software". Together with TPB, they also purchased Peerialism, and they plan to make TPB work in such a way that users get faster and higher-quality downloads, while at the same time compensating content providers and copyright owners.

"We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site," said Hans Pandeya, CEO of GGF, "The Pirate Bay is a site that is among the top 100 most visited Internet sites in the world. However, in order to live on, The Pirate Bay requires a new business model, which satisfies the requirements and needs of all parties, content providers, broadband operators, end users, and the judiciary. Content creators and providers need to control their content and get paid for it. File sharers' need faster downloads and better quality."

So, the big question on everybody's lips... Did the The Priate Bay owners (what do I do with that double definite article?!?) sell out? Will this be the end of TPB as we know it? According to a blog post on the team's weblog, we've got nothing to fear. "If the new owners will screw around with the site, nobody will keep using it. That's the biggest insurance one can have that the site will be run in the way that we all want to," the The Pirate Bay founders write.

Furthermore, "The profits from the sale will go into a foundation that is going to help with projects about freedom of speech, freedom of information and the openess of the nets." Time will tell whatever that means.

A surprising turn of events, and the comment on the blog post and elsewhere on the internet are anything but happy. People see this as the end of The Pirate Bay, and seeing for instance the whole Napster thing, that's not a stretch. Time will tell whatever comes out of this, but there's little to worry about. For those of us in who live in countries with sane laws, there are countless alternatives.